Reviews of the Bosch

It’s weird enough that there are two streaming-exclusive post-apocalypse movies starring cast-members from Stranger Things  in 2025 without them dropping just a week apart. Watching O’Dessa  felt like a touch of deja vu to me from just a week ago , only the experience wasn’t quite so obnoxious. Maybe next week there will be one with Finn Wolfhard for Amazon Prime that will be good. In fairness, O’Dessa comes very close to it at times. A bizarre movie from writer-director Geremy Jasper that adopts an intentionally archetypal structure that in some ways recalls George Miller’s recent Mad Max  movies in their mythologically empowered apocalypses. It’s a fascinating context that feels boldly out of step with the kind of conventions of modern movie storytelling, that could use such a shake-up every now and again. Unfortunately, though O’Dessa  doesn’t exactly lose the thread of that, it does get lost in spite of its flourishes. One of those flourishes is the fact tha...

The Looney Tunes  are an essential cultural institution that simply must be preserved. That is evidently not the outlook of the studio that created them, Warner Bros., under the auspices of David Zaslav, who is seemingly hellbent on keeping the brand from getting any kind of footing in the modern media landscape. He canceled the release of Coyote vs. Acme , a film that was fully finished, to claim as a tax write-off and similarly pulled the plug on the release of The Day the Earth Blew Up , a spin-off movie of the Looney Tunes Cartoons  series pushed to the recesses of HBO Max. This resulted in the unthinkable: a Looney Tunes  project, a brand more associated with Warner Bros. than anything else, being shopped around to other distributors because its parent doesn’t see its value anymore. Ketchup Entertainment picked it up and even financed a theatrical distribution, making this little project designed for streaming that ever elusive thing in the modern film landscape -a 2...

There’s a very curious theme that reveals itself at the end of Mark Anthony Green’s debut film Opus -a statement on the nature of infamy and how, especially in the internet age, it can spread with as much power and even adulation as traditional fame. Look at any of the “cancelled” celebrities whose profiles have exploded amongst new audiences merely out of the appeal of transgression from the seeming “status quo”. I’d gamble that a majority of J.K. Rowling’s followers these days never once picked up a copy of Harry Potter , but love that she’s fighting their culture war. Kanye West is also now attracting an audience simply for being controversial. The ending to Opus doesn’t offer an exact allegory given what its celebrity character does, but the impact it suggests fascinatingly taps into that. And I only wish that the movie up to that point was just as fascinating, or engaged with this kind of theming from an earlier point. Instead it plays out a tamer, less intuitive version of Mids...

Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a really solid tribute to the work of John Le Carré. It is also a good demonstration that his breed of espionage thriller can still be effective in a modern context -though it also helps that we’re back to a place where the British and the Russians are on oppositional sides geopolitically. And there is a space to be made for it in a world where spy movies, when they do come along, are explicitly action-oriented. A good spy flick can be just as much a mystery movie and hold our attention, especially if it’s well-written by someone like David Koepp who, after Presence and KIMI , has struck up a very effective collaboration with Soderbergh I’d like to see continue. Much like Le Carré’s best-known book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , Black Bag  is about an effort to root out a potential mole from a small selection of suspects embedded in the highest offices of British Intelligence -Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse even has the signature George Smi...

In these first few months of 2025, Jack Quaid has presented a solid portfolio of why he makes for a compelling rising movie star. In Novocaine , he plays a character not all that different from his character in Companion (and both of these are also not too far off from his breakthrough Hughie on The Boys ). Classic awkward if generally handsome nerds with a heart of gold towards the woman of their dreams. In Companion , this is largely an affect masking an insecure, apathetic, controlling personality, while in Novocaine  it is completely in earnest. And the fact that so soon after his hostile turn in Companion , he can play the flip-side so  convincingly in Novocaine   speaks I think to a valuable versatility he is capable of even within this archetype that he is probably this generation’s steward for. His quirky charm can be weaponized in a multitude of ways. That is likely why directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen singled him out for, of all things, an action movie that ...

Up front, the only reason to watch a Russo Brothers movie anymore is to clown on it. However, I don’t know if I’d encourage even that for The Electric State , their 320 million dollar Producers  scheme of a Netflix movie, the most expensive film ever produced for the platform and likely one of the worst. Further confirmation of their mediocre limitations as filmmakers as they once again attempt to graft the MCU aesthetics that are now all they know onto a source that little demands them -in this case an acclaimed 2018 dystopian novel by Simon Stålenhag. They’ve even reunited with Marvel stalwart writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who rise to the occasion of maintaining a consistent level of hackiness to the script as it follows strict generic blockbuster formulas and dilutes any semblance of cogency from the film’s concept. It is a convoluted premise to say the least, set in an alternate reality where the development of robots occurred over the twentieth century, coinc...

Bong Joon-ho just can’t get away from Parasites. I don’t think he’s particularly interested in trying. Mickey 17 , based on a novel by Edward Ashton, is a world away from Parasite  in a way that might feel jarring to someone unfamiliar with the range of Bong Joon-ho’s work -including those who perhaps greenlit the movie, far and away the biggest, most expensive project the Oscar-winning Korean auteur has ever had the luxury to tackle. Yet it is also firmly in line with Bong’s thematic and tonal sensibilities, a man whose genre films speak as much to his acute outlook on society as his more grounded pieces. And he’s not a filmmaker prone to subtlety in this -he makes fairly brazen what his movies are about, even as he approaches them from different vantage points. This one just happens to be one where he is viscerally having fun, something that I don’t think has ever been more apparent in his career. In his flirtations with absurdity, Mickey 17  is the first time in Bong’s fil...